the agency

Slight Delay

2009-08-01T01:00:49Z

I haven't done any work on this project for quite a while, mostly because I've been working on other areas of 3D production, as well as more general painting and illustration. So I won't be meeting my original deadline, but do intend to get back to this project by the end of the year.

New Eye

2008-12-07T22:51:24Z

I've been working on a new eye model. This still needs work on the iris, but I've learned a lot from this little exercise. I've used a NURBS sphere for the eyeball, plus a deformation lattice to shape it. Using modifier objects is a technique I need to explore a lot more. My handling of materials is improving all the time too. This model has an Extended Material Node (woohoo) for the eyeball material, and of course a transparency map to create the cornea. Apart from that, only colour maps so far, not bump or spec. Still, looking pretty good I think.

Power!!

2008-12-05T09:27:32Z

My current box cost me $500 about three years ago. Fine for most of what I do, but it struggles with 3D. So, with a significant payment for an extra job that I did at work, I decided to upgrade my hardware. My new Dell system is on the way - Core i7 processor, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 64 bit OS (Vista, but I'll survive that), 1TB harddrive etc. Basically, state of the art. I didn't pay an extra $1000 for the extreme CPU, but what I've got should be pretty good for both modelling and rendering. The four cores run eight threads, so rendering should be a blitz.

Meanwhile, I'm working on the eye. There's a free download tutorial (four movies) on modelling a realistic eye from the Gnomon Workshop. I've spent quite a bit there on tutorials in recent times, so it's nice to get a freebie for a change.

SSS

2008-12-01T07:17:34Z

I've been investigating node-based materials. I especially want to map out where subsurface scattering takes place on my model, rather than have it everywhere or nowhere. I used Tony Mullen's book Bounce, Tumble, and Splash as my main reference, because it has the best section on node-based materials in Blender I've yet found. However I did have one problem, and emailed Tony for some advice. He got back to me pretty quickly with an answer to my problem, and I now have a lot more sophisticated control over materials than I had before. I love the internet.

My primary reference for this project is Creative Essence: The Face by Ballistic Publishing. However the various authors of that book use Maya, Max, Mental Ray, etc, and it's a bit hard sometimes to work out how to do equivalents in Blender. I am getting there though. I hope to understand 3D enough one day that translating is relatively straightforward, but I ain't there yet.

Round 2 Complete

2008-11-30T03:02:51Z

Round 2

Round 1

I've decided to call my second round on this project complete. To save the reader scrolling down, I've put my Round 1 and Round 2 images together here for broad comparison. I'll start again from scratch. There are some problems with the mesh that need to be addressed, and I might extend it a bit too. I might work on the eyes first, like I did with round 2. It might be easier to actually model the eyelids that way. I need to be a lot more careful with my texture painting. I think I'll use all my available images this time instead of just a front and side projection. And of course, I need to practise my hair styling skills. I'm expecting version 3 to be a ripper. After that I'll probably look into facial animation, and definitely extending the mesh to a fuller body.

Boot Camp

2008-11-29T04:58:07Z

I've given Caitlin very short hair so I can concentrate on other aspects of hair apart from styling. It's starting to look a bit more real. I'll start working on eyes, eyebrows and lashes soon, which should finish off this second iteration of my project. It's slowly coming together.

I've picked up a couple of other techniques too. Reading Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting and Rendering was very useful. He has a very sophisticated approach to 3D lighting. In my current image I've achieved a better highlight in the eyes by moving them to a separate layer, adding a light there that lights only the objects on that layer, and is set for specular light only. Voila, nice specular highlights in the eye without adding to the general lighting anywhere else. The book actually refers to this as Link Lighting, but I figured its implemented via layers in Blender.

Later...

I've added some eye lashes and re-rendered. Lookin' good.

Meet the Stylist

2008-11-25T07:33:29Z

The things we do. On my way home from work today I dropped in at my local Borders, and came away with Haircutting for Dummies. So, a little time on Hair Styling, and my 3D models will be looking so smart. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to transfer the skills to the virtual environment.

More Hair

2008-11-20T12:44:56Z

I've spent some more time on hair, and am starting to get the hang of it. It's about now that I feel the need for a more powerful computer. Hair takes ages to work on, everything happens in slow motion. Caitlin has a very poor hair cut at this stage, but it's an advance on the image mapped hair she had before. Slowly getting there. I finished a big project at work today, and should have quite a bit more time and energy for this project for a while.

Hair

2008-11-11T08:23:17Z

I've started looking at Blender's particle system for creating hair. Preliminary results are not worth showing here (I think there's already enough preliminary stuff on this blog), but looks promising. It's possible to cut and style hair in Blender. Perhaps I'll end up using a hair stylist to style the hair on my 3d models!!

Glowing

2008-11-10T07:28:25Z

I wasn't totally happy with the lighting in the last image I did, so I've simply set the skin to emit in my latest version rather than using lights. It's a lot closer to the actual photographs.

Liquefy

2008-11-09T04:17:37Z

I spent some time reviewing Paul Campion's video tutorial on Texture Painting. His approach is to cut up bits of his reference photos and paste them onto the basic Lambert render, blending all the edges as he goes. I guess part of his motivation is that the 3d model doesn't fit the reference all that well, so such a drastic approach is necessary. I had another go at texture painting my model, but ended up using Liquefy for pixel pushing instead. My photos are actually a pretty good fit, given that I used them as reference for modelling.

I had a couple of goes with it, and ended up with something a little better than yesterdays effort. However between saving all the different versions of image files, I ended up forgetting to save the actual blend file, so I've got nothing to show for my efforts. Except experience of course. I feel that I'm getting the hang of it all, and it won't be too long before I've got some pretty good results. I guess then I'll have to thing about hair, and doing some proper eyes. Once that's done, a nearly usable model. Well, a body might be useful, and some clothes. Might get them from somewhere else. I'm pretty happy just working on heads at the moment.

Texture Painting V2

2008-11-08T06:32:57Z

So, I did some basic texture painting of my version 2 mesh. Better result than the first time. The better eyes help too, although some realistic eyes would help even more. I haven't done any bump or spec mapping, and the colours are all wrong. Still, I'm happy with what I've achieved. From here it's just a matter of time.

Neck

2008-11-07T22:06:16Z

This morning I finished the neck, pretty much. Jonathan Williamson has one more tutorial in his series on modeling the female head, which I can't remember watching before. Final tweaks and cleanup. I might pay a bit more attention to it this time.

I'm not sure if this model is a good likeness of Caitlin or not. Texture painting makes so much difference to appearance. Lack of eyebrows, eyelashes, hair, etc makes a big difference to. I find it hard to evaluate form. Overall I like this model, although I'm sure there are a lot of small details I'm not aware of. Anyway, I expect the texture painting and tweaking the mesh to be a fairly interactive process. Guess I'll get better with practice.

New Look

2008-11-07T06:53:38Z

I've decided to put my best result so far at the top of the page, and keep it updated. So, a bit of a hack of the MT template. I might redo the default style sheet sometime - not high on my agenda at the moment though.

Moving Right Along

2008-11-06T11:31:46Z

Nearing the end of second draft. This one's still not quite right, but I think it's a bit better than the first one. I'll probably spend a bit more time texture painting this too. I'm pretty busy at work at the moment, but should have some time in a couple of weeks to finish this off and maybe have a third go before Christmas.